We aspire to an objective, practical understanding of Ernst Jünger's life and works and encourage other seekers of freedom and self-realisation to join us. Jünger's insights can function as a unique roadmap to freedom and meaning for individuals in today's social and spiritual landscape. Crucial is his figure of the autonomous and inwardly-free anarch (contrasted with the impotent and self-destructive anarchist) as presented in his masterpiece EUMESWIL.

May 29, 2019

Review of THE FOREST PASSAGE by Ernst Juenger

The Forest Passage (by Ernst Jünger)

Ernst Jünger was one of the more fascinating men of the twentieth century. Remembered in the English-speaking world primarily for his World War I memoir, The Storm of Steel, he was famous in Europe for a range of right-leaning thought spanning nearly eighty years (he lived from 1896 to 1998). His output was prodigious, more than fifty books along with voluminous correspondence, and not meant or useful as a seamless ideology, although certain themes apparently recur. This book, The Forest Passage, was published in 1951, and is a compelling examination of how life should be conducted under modern ideological tyranny.

Jünger’s answer is jarring, both in its originality, and in its flat rejection of any relevancy of those modern (though failing) totems, liberal democracy and egalitarianism. Jünger was no Nazi; he contemptuously rejected their efforts to profit off his reputation, and was tangentially involved in the Stauffenberg plot. But he had just as little use for modern democracy or liberalism; much of his thought seems to have revolved around a type of social and political elitism with a spiritual core. It appears that The Forest Passage was his first exploration of the specific topic of resistance to tyranny; he developed the thought in this book further with a novel published in 1977, Eumeswil, which I have not read.

This is quite a difficult book to
read; it can be opaque, and it assumes the reader’s recognition of
various oblique references (I had to look up that Champollion was a
decrypter of Egyptian hieroglyphics, for example). This 2013 edition, from Telos Press, is greatly helped by occasional notes (though more
would have been better), and an outstanding introduction from Russell
Berman. Most of Jünger’s books have not been translated, and Telos, a
left-leaning entity, has usefully been translating and reprinting at
least a few, all of which I have bought and am now working through as I
explore alternatives to our own crumbling social and political system.

Jünger had lived through World War I (barely), receiving numerous awards for bravery, and become famous for The Storm of Steel. That book was and is often criticized for being the mirror image of anti-war writings, from the British war poets to All Quiet on the Western Front.
Jünger did not oppose the war, even after its disastrous end; he liked
certain aspects of it, regarding them as spiritually valuable, even
epic. (In this he was much like Erwin Rommel, who also wrote a memoir that made him famous,
though Rommel was practical about his like for war, not spiritual).
During the interwar period Jünger was a key figure in the so-called
“Conservative Revolution,” the loose movement of intellectuals
(including Oswald Spengler and Carl Schmitt), opposed to Weimar and
democracy, and more broadly to modernism and individualism, as well as
to the coming thing, Communism. During the war, Jünger also opposed the
Nazis, mostly passively, although he wrote a novel implicitly critical
of Hitler (On The Marble Cliffs), something he could get away
with because of his fame. After the war, for decades, he was a leading
public intellectual, never forgiven by the dominant Left for his
rightist views, but able to haughtily ignore their carping, and widely
honored until the end of his life.

In 1951, of course, Germany stood
between the immediate past of Nazism and the immediate threat of Soviet
Communism. This is the backdrop of The Forest Passage, and the
book cannot be understood without keeping it in mind. That said,
Jünger’s thought is directed at challenging any ideological tyranny, which includes,
increasingly, our own Western “liberal democracy.” What should a
person oppressed by such a tyrannical state do? The book is really an
answer on two levels: what he should do in the external world, and what
he should do in his internal world. More precisely, it is an
exploration of how the latter should drive the former. Jünger was not
George Orwell, predicting the victory of global tyranny. In fact, he
was quite optimistic about the future, predicting elsewhere that
ultimately technology would allow a global state, a “planetary order,”
to emerge under which humans could flourish. But in The Forest Passage he was interested in tyrannies present or future, whatever their origin, and how one should live under them.

Jünger begins by discussing how in an
oppressive state the mere act of voting “no” where ninety-eight percent
vote “yes,” as demanded and enforced by the state and by one’s fellow
voters, is an act of rebellion. It does not matter that the state
actually wants fewer than one hundred percent to vote “yes,” because
that way the vote seems more realistic, and, more importantly, the state
can thereby justify further action against its opponents, whose
existence is by the vote made visible to all, and also therefore the
need for their suppression so that Utopia can finally be reached
(although, as in Zeno’s Paradox, it can never actually be, for that
would deprive the dictatorship of its reason for seeking more power).
“Dictatorships cannot survive on pure affirmation—they need hate, and
with it terror, to provide a simultaneous counterbalance.” (This is
true also of proto-dictatorships, such as today’s American Left. As Shelby Steele has recently pointed out,
the Left existentially needs to see racism everywhere, so they can keep
whipping up hate to augment their power through terror.) Rather, the
point of, and the meaning of, the vote “no” is not to “shake the
opponent, but [to] change the person who has decided to go through with
it.” He, by the choice of voting “no,” or by any equivalent choice,
becomes a “forest rebel,” transformed into something new, who takes the
“forest passage,” taking actions that are also something new.

Here, “something new” is not a
throwaway line of mere contrast to the existing tyranny. The newness of
the forest rebel’s path is critical to Jünger’s analysis. The man who
votes “no,” the freshly minted forest rebel, is not trying to turn back
to the old ways of democracy, or any other specific prior political
system. Those are dead and gone, along with his own past individual
nature. He is on a new path. “This is why the numerous attempts under
the Caesars to return to the republic had to fail. The republicans
either fell in the civil war,
or they came out of it transformed.” You cannot go back. The way is
shut. While Jünger is focused on tyranny, this principle is more
generally applicable, as Jünger’s reference to Rome shows. In fact, I
think that newness is a critical element in planning our own future.
For Reaction, something I wish to implement after the inevitable rupture
as our own system dies, is properly viewed not a turning back, as its
caricaturists and opponents would have it, but the creation of a new thing informed, in part, by the wisdom of the past.
This is what Jünger calls “retrospection,” conducted by a small
minority, made possible because “in the nature of things,” “when
catastrophes announce themselves . . . the initiative will always pass
into the hands of a select minority who prefer danger to servitude.”
Failing to grasp that newness is essential, and must be accepted and
made central, will lead to nostalgia, and thence to dissonance and
failure of all political plans and action.

What most of all characterizes the
forest rebel is his devotion to freedom. He is internally completely
free, and he works for external freedom as well. These things set him
apart from both the tyrannical state and the mass of men. But it
essential to note that Jünger is not a libertarian. His idea
of freedom has very little in common with Robert Nozick and less with
Milton Friedman. The freedom of the forest rebel is not the freedom to
do as he pleases; it is not the unbridled autonomy and atomized individualism
that were the poison at the heart of the Enlightenment and are the
engine of its destruction. Those are “unworthy interpretations” of
freedom; Jünger specifically sneers at the French Revolution. Nor is
it exactly the older conception of freedom, the ability to choose
rightly, although it is much closer to that than to libertarianism.
Rather, it is a modernized version of that, consisting of two related
threads. First, and concretely, the refusal to obey or even acknowledge
the commands of an oppressive and malevolent, state. Second, and
abstractly, a spiritual core with which the forest rebel analyzes his
decisions, informed by a rejection of degrading “automatism” and its
consequence, “fatalism,” in favor of self-rule and of the virtues of
“art, philosophy, and theology.”

Jünger’s analysis of voting under tyranny prefigures Václav Havel’s famous analysis of the grocer
who refuses to put the sign “Workers of the World, Unite!” in his shop
window. For Havel, this is refusing to “live within a lie,” which
allows the grocer to reclaim his identity and dignity, but for which he
must pay, because even this minor act of defiance threatens the entire
regime, even though it has no explicitly political intent or meaning.
The forest rebel’s attitude is much the same. And even though Jünger
focuses more on the rebel’s internal mental state than his specific
external actions, he is quite clear that he expects the forest rebel,
ultimately, to act, rather than merely ruminate.

Confusingly, at the same time Jünger
sometimes seems to say that the forest rebel mostly lives and acts
completely in isolation, in the forest, a type of garden, but a solitary
one. True, the forest rebel battles “Leviathan,” but his is sometimes
characterized as a holding action, to keep himself from the degradation
of the masses who acquiesce, and, implicitly, to form the core of
something to come. This ambiguity as to the actual actions to be taken
may be deliberate, for Jünger knows that context dictates action, and he
has no Marxist-flavored belief in inevitable turns of history.
Ultimately, he says that “The armor of the new Leviathans has its own
weak points, which must continually be felt out, and this assumes both
caution and daring of a previously unknown quality. We may imagine an
elite opening this battle for a new freedom, a battle that will demand
great sacrifices and which should leave no room for any interpretations
that are unworthy of it.” Thus, Jünger always returns to the concept of
battle, and it is a fair conclusion that is what he expects of the
ideal forest rebel. “The task of the forest rebel is to stake out
vis-à-vis the Leviathan the measures of freedom that are to obtain in
future ages. He will not get by this opponent with mere ideas.”

The forest rebel is therefore
exemplified by William Tell, mentioned twice in this brief book. Tell,
of course, was the (probably mythical, but no matter) fifteenth-century
Swiss crossbowman who shot an apple off his son’s head at the command of
the malevolent state, represented by Albrecht Gessler, proxy for the
Habsburg dukes who ruled Tell’s canton. Gessler’s command was
punishment for Tell refusing to salute Gessler’s hat, which he had
placed on a pole and then required the people to salute, in order to
humiliate them and bring low their spirit. Most of us remember that
Tell put two crossbow bolts in his belt, and when asked by Gessler,
after successfully shooting the apple, why he had done that, replied
that the second was for Gessler, had Tell hit his son. Most of us
probably do not remember the second act of the story—Tell escapes, to
the forest, and then soon ambushes Gessler and assassinates him,
starting a successful rebellion. (By coincidence, I bought several
books on Tell for my children a few weeks ago. I am glad I did that;
these are important lessons and guides to action, and I am willing to
bet zero children are told Tell’s story in most schools today.) Tell
was no libertarian—he was a free man in a free society, but he was bound
by, and loyal to, that society and its rules. His was the freedom of
Leonidas, not of Hugh Hefner.

Tell is, however, not the only rebel
Jünger praises—one other, an anonymous man, gets his nod. Speaking of
the breakdown of the rule of law in 1933 Berlin, and the acquiescence of
the population in Nazi suppression of political opponents, he says “A
laudable exception deserves mention here, that of a young social
democrat who shot down half a dozen so-called auxiliary policemen [i.e.,
NSDAP storm troopers] at the entrance of his apartment. He still
partook of the substance of the old Germanic freedom, which his enemies
only celebrated in theory.” It’s hard to miss Jünger’s message, and
it’s not that the forest rebel should meditate silently on freedom while
sitting at home.

Both by such examples, and by explicit
statements, Jünger is clear that his contemplated rebellion is not one
of raising an army, but of ad hoc or guerrilla warfare. When striking
physically at the state, the forest rebel is not to worry unduly about
the mechanics of rebellion. Instead, he must focus on tools and getting
the party started. The details will take care of themselves. “In
regard to organizing maneuvers and exercises, setting up bases and
systems adapted to the new form of resistance—in short, in regard to the
whole practical side of things, people will always emerge who will
occupy themselves with these aspects and give them form.” Therefore,
“More important is to apply the old maxim that a free man be armed—and
not with arms under lock and key in an armory or barracks, but arms
kept in his apartment, under his own bed.” Moreover, in matters of
arms, a man “makes his own sovereign decisions.” Jünger would not
approve of today’s gun grabbers, any more than he did of the gun
grabbing by the Nazis or the Bolsheviks,
because he saw clearly what the seizure of arms always made possible
and was, and is, intended to make possible, whether by Lenin or Dianne
Feinstein—the triumph of the totalitarian state.

Even aside from open rebellion,
though, the forest rebel has an outsized effect relative to his
numbers. He is a “chemical reagent”; because he is (physically)
surrounded by others, he will influence them. Hence the growth in
police in oppressive states, and “these wolves [the forest rebels] are
not only strong in themselves; there is also the danger that one fine
morning they will transmit their characteristics to the masses, so that
the flock turns into a pack. This is a ruler’s nightmare.” (Here
Jünger departs from Havel, since Havel thinks that the “wolf” is
actually representative of the majority of people, and Jünger thinks
most people are intellectually complicit with the tyrannical state,
which is perhaps why Havel rejected revolt, preferring the power of
example.) How are those characteristics transmitted? Through
imagination, which “provides the basic force for the action.”
Imagination is not itself enough, but it, poetry writ large, provides
the spark. I would only add that the impact of imagination cannot be
predicted. Cometh the hour, cometh the man, but it is impossible to
know anything more in advance, which makes it essential that the forest
rebel keep the powder needed to set alight the conflagration dry and
ready to hand.

Jünger, and the forest rebel, laugh at
the idea of egalitarianism as a denial of basic reality. The forest
rebel is an aristocrat, not of blood, but of virtue, which is real
aristocracy. To Jünger and the forest rebel, it is blindingly obvious
that all men are not equal—they may be equal before God, but the forest
rebel is the superior of the masses, for his choice is hard and
risk-filled, yet objectively better. Not for Jünger the idea that each
man’s choice is merely each man’s choice. No, some choices are better,
and therefore, the people who make them are superior. They are a
“heroic elite.” This aristocracy is open to all; Jünger says that the
freedom he calls for “is prefigured in myth and in religions, and it
always returns; so, too, the giants and the titans always manifest with
the same apparent superiority. The free man brings them down; and he
need not always be a prince or a Hercules. A stone from a shepherd’s
sling, a flag raised by a virgin, and a crossbow have already proven
sufficient.” David the son of Jesse, Joan of Arc,
and William Tell are the elite. “This miracle has happened, even
countless times, when a man stepped out of the lifeless numbers to
extend a helping hand to others. . . . Whatever the situation, whoever
the other, the individual can become this fellow human being—and thereby
reveal his native nobility. The origins of aristocracy lay in giving
protection, protection from the threat of monsters and demons. This is
the hallmark of nobility, and it still shines today in the guard who
secretly slips a piece of bread to a prisoner. This cannot be lost, and
on this the world subsists.”

It is not only in his demand for
private weapons and his disdain for egalitarianism that Jünger is wildly
not politically correct, a bone in the throat of today’s Left. Not for
Jünger other modern ideas, such as false gender equality or the idea
that the liberal democratic state is the real bulwark of our real
freedoms. “Long periods of peace foster certain optical illusions: one
is the conviction that the inviolability of the home is grounded in the
constitution, which should guarantee it. In reality, it is grounded in
the family father, who, sons at his side, fills the doorway with an axe
in hand.” This is not a fashionable set of ideas, but I’m betting all
of them are about to gain fresh traction.

Along the same lines, it is very
clear, though mostly below the surface in this book, that Jünger thinks
highly of vigorous religious belief, as opposed to modern godless
ideologies, as a key part of a forest rebel’s thought. A transcendent
belief is necessary for the forest rebel to succeed, or even to be a
forest rebel. Jünger praises “churches and sects” as a counterpoint to
what drives the tyrannies he fears, “natural science raised to the level
of philosophical perfection.” (He also specifically exalts Helmuth
James von Moltke, the deeply Christian founder of the Kreisau Circle,
executed by the Nazis in 1945.) Faith means freedom; materialism
reinforces tyranny. Religion (implicitly Christianity, for Jünger tells
us Christ has shown the way to conquer the root of all fears, the fear
of death) is good, it prepares man “for paths that lead into darkness
and the unknown,” though not enough by itself, and in any case it will
always be persecuted by the tyrannical state, which insists on absolute
power. Thus, we find “tyrannical regimes so rabidly persecuting such
harmless creatures as the Jehovah’s Witnesses—the same tyrannies that
reserve seats of honor for their nuclear physicists.”

All this is very interesting, and
offers much material for reflection. We get a very good idea of the
type of system Jünger does not want—modern ideological tyrannies, in
short, the heirs of the French Revolution. We understand the mechanism
for resistance and eventual overthrow. But what system does Jünger
want? On that he is less clear, but there are occasional glimpses. It
is most definitely not modern liberal democracy, although again there is
little direct criticism of such modern systems, even if in the 1930s
Jünger had vociferously criticized Weimar. We can get a clue, though,
when Jünger refers to the “virtuous way” as derived from “simple people .
. . who were not overcome by the hate, the terror, the mechanicalness
of platitudes. These people withstood the propaganda and its plainly
demonic insinuations. When such virtues also manifest in a leader of
people, endless blessings can result, as with Augustus for example.
This is the stuff of empires. The ruler reigns not by taking but by
giving life. And therein lies one of the great hopes: that one perfect
human being will step forth among the millions.” That is, Jünger wants
a Man of Destiny, to free us of ideological tyranny, and lead us to the
sunlit uplands.

This resonates very strongly with me; as I have written elsewhere, we await that Man of Destiny, an Augustus
for the new age, and he will not come borne on the wings of so-called
liberal democracy. My feeling is that as the cracks spread in the West,
tyrannies and oppressions of one sort or another are increasingly
likely to offer to oppress us, in a way that seemed inconceivable even
fifteen years ago, and they will have to be resisted, with shot and
shell. Who could have predicted, so soon after the fall of Communism
and the apparent end of ideological tyranny in the West, that a book
like The Forest Passage would become relevant again? Not me.
But that’s where we are, and perhaps some of Jünger’s thought will
shorten the path through, and time spent in, the forest.